Bit credit to Ranieri as well: subs all made a positive impact, and Dyer in particular just gave us another dimension. What about justifications other benefit of reflecting on one’s reasoning? My proposal is that the more difficult it is to see why an explanation is improbable, the more room for error there is. However, when an explanation’s improbability is obvious, the reasoning required to understand its probability does not require much thought. Hence, there is less to be gained by carefully spelling out one’s reasoning to see whether this reasoning is sound. For instance, the court does not have to carefully reflect on whether they might be making an error when they assume that mind controlling aliens do not exist. According to the Supreme Court, courts can reject an explanation if it ‘did not become plausible’ during the criminal proceedings. 8 The obvious question when interpreting this statement is why some explanations need to ‘become plausible’. The answer to this lies in the proof standard. As mentioned, in the Netherlands the proof standard states that the court should be convinced of the defendant’s guilt based on the admissible evidence. However, in practice, many legal scholars believe that the standard is actually similar to that of common law countries—that guilt has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt ( Ter Haar & Meijer, 2018, 7.4; Nijboer et al., 2017, pp. 73–74). So, if the defendant hopes to be acquitted by telling an alternative story, that story needs to be good enough to create a reasonable doubt about his guilt (assuming that the prosecution’s case is in itself strong enough).

The notion of credibility can easily be expressed in Bayesian terms. Whether a story is credible depends on the answer to the following question: ‘given that a witness testifies to fact X, what is the probability of X?’ ( Goldman, 1999, 4.2–4.4). To put it in terms of a formula, we are interested in P(Defendant’s explanation | Defendant offers this explanation in this way). So, the fact that this defendant offers this explanation, and at this moment, can count as evidence about whether that explanation is true. The ... Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable," 2007 book by author Nassim Nicholas Taleb Crossword Clue The case then went to the Supreme Court. It decreed that while courts should ideally point to evidence that refutes the explanation, 3 they can also reject alternative explanations even when there is no evidence that refutes it. In particular, the Supreme Court distinguished three grounds for such a rejection. First and second, courts can argue that the explanation ‘did not become plausible’ or that it is ‘not credible’. Third, some explanations are so ‘highly improbable’ that they require no response at all. There have been plenty of other heroes along the way – head of recruitment Steve Walsh has crafted an outstanding scouting network so essential to the building of this history-making squad; fans’ favourite midfielder Andy King, meanwhile, has become the first player to win the top three divisions with the same club, and now prepares for a final-day trip to Stamford Bridge – the ground on which he used to be a ball boy in Ranieri’s Chelsea days. All this is supposed to be satirical but it has little or no resemblance to life as we know it, without which satire is impossible. Just as I was trying hard to become interested in the advertised state-of-the-nation-satirical-political novel, it suddenly turned thriller, and pretty daft thriller at that: the prime minister’s senior private secretary is murdered because he threatens to blow the whistle; two other people from the political classes are hit on the head, one with a wrench and the other, if I remember clearly, with the butt of a gun. The young woman who was hit on the head with a wrench, Jen Lewis, is the daughter of Myfanwy Davies-Jones, who is, I think, supposed to evoke Molly Parkin. Various grandees such as historian Lord Briskett and the mysterious gay fixer and strategist Alois Haydn pop up. Haydn, who is bankrupt, decides that, although he is the chief adviser of the yes camp and the architect of the conspiracy, he will leak what has happened to the opposition and at the same time short Britain, making himself many millions when the markets crash. So this becomes a financial fraud novel as well. Haydn’s Indian partner leaves him in disgust, perhaps to demonstrate that there is some decency and sense in this world.

The club, too, have done themselves proud as a whole: Leicester’s owners have learned the hard way of running one – lest we forget that they allowed Sven-Goran Eriksson to burn many of their millions before Nigel Pearson arrived to clean up the Swede’s mess in 2011 – but this season they have been vindicated in their unwavering support.

P ( H 1 | E ) = P ( E | H 1 ) × P ( H 1 ) P ( H 2 | E ) = P ( E | H 2 ) × P ( H 2 ) Here H 1 and H 2 represent the hypotheses that either one or the other explanation is true. In this version of the formula, whether the evidence skews the prior ratio in favor of guilt or innocence depends on the ‘likelihood ratio’, P(E|H 1)/P(E|H 2). When the likelihood ratio is higher than 1 it means that the evidence raises the probability of H 1 whereas a likelihood ratio lower than 1 means that the probability of H 2 is raised.In fact, Leicester have won an incredible 14 matches by a single strike this season – seven more than Arsenal, and eight better than Tottenham and Manchester City. These benefits of justification also occur when courts justify why they reject an alternative explanation. In such cases the justification gives both the court and the audience insight into why that explanation is improbable enough not to create a reasonable doubt. However, there are cases in which this kind of insight is not required. In particular, some stories that defendants tell are so obviously improbable that we would gain little by arguing against them. For example, take a (real) case in which the defendant pleaded that he was not accountable for the child porn on his computer because his mind was controlled by aliens. 16 It seems fair to say that no reasonable audience would consider the ‘alien’ explanation remotely probable. Furthermore, a defendant who offers such an explanation would either be delusional or insincere. So, it is improbable that arguments would sway him. Hence, the court would (most likely) gain little by justifying why it rejects this alternative explanation, with respect to the parties, legal community and general audience’s understanding of it. Next season the bigger clubs can reclaim their places atop the pile, and even make their plays at trying to buy Leicester’s best players. They might just succeed. That ‘highly improbable’ should be interpreted as ‘obviously improbable’ is also something that has implicitly been noted by Dutch courts. For example, the Dutch Supreme Court once overturned a decision by a lower court because it had failed to give a justification for its decision to reject the defendant’s alternative scenario. 17 The supreme court argued that even if the lower court thinks that a defendant’s alternative scenario is improbable, it will sometimes have to offer a justification for this conclusion, because not every improbability is ‘evident’. What does an explanation with a low prior probability look like? First, it may have parts that do not fit well together. For instance, the explanation might imply that the defendant was in two places at the same time. Alternatively, the defendant may tell a story in which motive and action do not fit well together, such as a story about a robbery where nothing was stolen. Finally, the explanation may consist of a number of independent and individually unlikely events ( Lettinga, 2015, p. 53; Josephson, 2000). Second, an explanation can also have a low prior probability because it does not fit well with our generalizations about how the world typically works. For instance, we may believe that innocent bystanders do not run away from the police, that a suspect cannot cross the city in 10 min or that the police rarely forges evidence. The more an explanation violates such generalizations, the lower its prior probability is. 5. Incredible explanations are told by an unreliable storyteller